Yum! Taco Bell to tickle Indian taste buds

PUNE: After two years of talks and research, Yum! Restaurants International, the owner of quick serve restaurant brands such as Pizza Hut and KFC, will finally introduce the Taco Bell brand in India in the latter half of 2008. Through with its first round of consumer research, Yum! has begun the second round to fine tune findings from the first round, Taco Bell India general manager Ashok Bajpai told ET.

Yum! had announced plans to bring Taco Bell to India in November 2006. ���Most of 2006 was spent in selecting the countries for opening the Taco Bell chain. We finalised on Mexico, Spain, the UAE along with India. We have been building our team and conducted initial researches in 2007. We started a third-party consumer research study in October 2007 for the brand value in India. We have got positive results, which confirm that Taco Bell has a good potential in India,��� Mr Bajpai said.

Taco Bell will dish out a range of tacos, a Mexican style sandwich with meat, poultry or vegetable fillings, along with a wide menu. Taco Bell will be initially launched in the metros. ���Though there are smaller cities where Pizza Hut and KFC are doing good business, we will prefer to start with the larger cities,��� Mr Bajpai said.

Yum! Restaurants International, which is already present in India through Pizza Hut and KFC, is the second-largest quick-serve restaurant format, after McDonald���s. In India, Yum! has 140 outlets of Pizza Hut and 34 of KFC. ���We plan to double our revenues from India in the next three years and most of this revenue growth will come from Taco Bell,��� Mr Bajpai said.

While Pizza Hut serves all variants of pizzas, KFC serves chicken products. Yum! also owns two other brands globally, All American Food and Long John Silver, which are not present in India. Taco Bell has began work on its publicity campaign. Advertising agency JWT, which also handles the Pizza Hut account, has bagged the advertising contract.